Hurricane sweeps through Long Island and New England, killing more than 100 in 1938

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Sep 20, 2015 | 12:00 PM

A damaged ferry boat sitting in shallow water in Providence, R.I., following the deadly hurricane of 1938 that hit the Northeast. (Leslie Jones/AP)

(Originally published by the Daily News on Sept. 22, 1938.)

Along a fifty-mile stretch of Long Island's South Shore, Coast Guardsmen and volunteer searchers hunted this morning for bodies of victims of a tropical hurricane that had swept that North Atlantic coast and taken a known toll of 116 lives. Nineteen were dead in New York, most of them on Long Island, and the death list was growing hourly. In New England, ninety-seven perished. Scores were missing.

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The fashionable Watch Hill section of Westerly, R.I., was reported wiped out. New London, Conn., was fighting a destructive series of fires raging along its waterfront. Hartford, Conn., was flooded in its downtown areas. The Coast Guard estimated 700 vessels were lost.

In swank West Hampton Beach, where 160 Summer homes were destroyed by the wind and sea, the bodies of seven persons - six women and one man - had been washed ashore at midnight, and thirty residents of the Summer colony were still unaccounted for.

Fire Island, dotted with Summer bungalow colonies, was completely inundated. Whole communities were wiped out, their Summer bungalows swept into the angry sea. Kismet was reported swept bare of all buildings and its yachts basin destroyed. At Saltaire, one of the island's most populous communities, 100 late vacationists were marooned, with more than 500 of its 1,000 cottages washed into Great South Bay. Its 400-foot pier was swept away.

Fair Harbor and Ocean Beach shared the same fate.

The bodies of two women, recovered by Coast Guardsmen after being washed on the beach, were identified as those of Mrs. Hass and a Mme. Bazinet. Mrs. Glads Van, sister of William Manning, caretaker of Camp Cheerful, a Summer camp for crippled boys, was among the injured. The camp, which closed two weeks ago, was completely razed.

Three new inlets to Great South Bay had been cut across the island from the Atlantic; and the Coast Guard Station, twenty feet above the normal level of the sea, was surrounded by water.

In Patchogue at midnight, a fire alarm summoned all the men in the village. They were asked to set out as quickly as possible for the Center Moriches - West Hampton area to search the beach for bodies and to aid the homeless.

At the same hour the Connecticut death list stood at twenty-one; Rhode Island counted thirty-two; Massachusetts, thirty-seven, and New Hampshire, seven.

Staten Island and New Jersey had one fatality each and Queens County, two. At Point Lookout, L.I., a woman died of a heart attack, caused by fear of the storm.

A one-armed man in the Bronx gave his life assisting in the rescue of several persons marooned on the Fort Schuyler seawall. He was Burt Finning, 45, 115 Fort Schuyler Road.

At New London, Conn., sixty-nine fires broke out along the waterfront and the state militia was called out to prevent looting.

Short wave radio waves carried the news of the destruction in Rhode Island's Watch Hill. A message from a Providence, R.I., reporter said: "There has been great loss of life and property. The militia is out and the Red Cross is in need of help."

The fires of New London paralyzed the city's lighting system, and the inhabitants felt their way through a storm-wracked city by candlelight. The barkentine Marcelas, a training ship for seamen, started the blaze when it was blown ashore, upsetting and exploding.

Fire Perils City.

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Flames soon were communicated to buildings along the waterfront, and the whole city was threatened with destruction. Firemen were hampered by huge trees blown across streets and sidewalks.

The situation was so serious that field agents were dispatched to the stricken area by the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C. Amateur radio stations carried appeals for aid with the aid of New York's.

New Jersey Coast Guardsmen were being rushed to Long Island to aid in the rescue work, and the Coast Guard also was removing the rowboats from Central Park Lake to be used to reach the marooned.

Floods pouring into the power houses of the Consolidated-Edison Co., earlier in the night, had plunged hundreds of hotels, stores and apartment houses into darkness. Power failure also paralyzed service for a time on the Manhattan and Bronx divisions of the Independent Subway and the Hudson tubes were tied up by inundated tracks.

$2,000,000 Yacht Loss.

It was estimated that the damage done by the hurricane to yachts alone amounted to more than $2,000,000. The storm-whipped surf rolled up to the front porch of Mayor LaGuardia's Summer residence at Northport, where his wife and two children are residing. They stuck to their home, however, and the surf subsided without in inflicting material damage.

In the gale-swept waters of Long Island Sound, twenty passengers and a crew of fifteen on the ferry-boat Park City were riding out the storm last night off Belle Terre, L.I. Due at Bridgeport, Conn., at 3:30 P.M., the ferry was caught in the blow soon after leaving Port Jefferson, L.I., at 2 o'clock.

Early today the vessel was still off Belle Terre, Coast Guard reported. Telephone and telegraph lines were down for miles, making communication difficult with the stricken colonies. Bridges were swept away, impeding rescue work.

More than 200 were reported marooned in several shore colonies and in dire need of assistance as the ocean pounded at their homes.

The storm whipped over the Jersey Summer resorts to the car reaches of New England, through the Connecticut River Valley, spreading death and millions of dollars in property damage.

Hurricane Strike Fast.

The hurricane struck fast and furiously. At 6:30 P.M., storm warnings, which had flown all day from the Virginia Capes northward, were lowered as the gales swept out to sea. But the ruin was done, and quickly.

Staten Island's victim was John A. Martin, 76, of 127 Cassidy Place, West Brighton. He was bowled over by the wind and died of a fracture of the skull.

In Queens, Antonio Butera, 42, of 23-45 97th St., East Elmhurst, tripped over a fallen high tension wire and was electrocuted.

At Bayonne, N.J., John Buttner, 37, was electrocuted when a high tension wire fell across his automobile. Clarence Freiddel, 35, of 524 Rogers Ave., Inwood, L.I., was blown from the top of a fifty-foot oil tank at Hewlett, L.I., and killed. Mrs. Margaret Delehanty, 59, became panic-stricken when waves lashed at her Point Lookout, L.I., home and died of a heart attack.

Hempstead, Bay Shore and Babylon on Long Island, were in darkness as wind and rain bowled over electric light poles and ripped down wires. New Jersey towns also were without light, except for emergency candles or kerosene lamps.

Telephone and telegraph lines were carried away in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Several towns were without any means of communication - and their only mode of transportation was by rowboat.

Commuters' trains on the Long Island Rail Road and the New York Central were knocked off schedule as tracks were undermined and rails washed away. West St. ferry slips rose to the street level and on the Jersey side, in Weehawken, and Hoboken, water swirled up to the shoe tops of passengers.

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Radio broadcasting was knocked into a cocked hat. The power lines of WEAF were blown away at Bellmore, L.I., at 4:08 P.M. and such famous programs as Amos and Andy were switched to WJZ. Columbia also had trouble, and WABC, in a transoceanic broadcast from Praha, had to resort to a transatlantic telephone at 4:15 P.M.

Some of the finest parkway systems on the metropolitan area were closed as the pounding rain threatened to undermine foundations.

Hutchinson River Parkway was closed for ten miles from Port Chester to Boston Post Road. Bronx River Parkway was blocked from Mount Vernon to the Bronx boundary. Saw Mill River Parkway was out of commission from Hawthorne Circle to Pleasantville. Many New Jersey highways also were impassable.

Rescue Calls Deluge Police

Men and women were swept off their feet all over the city. Police Headquarters in both Manhattan and Brooklyn were deluged with calls to rescue marooned families, to pump out cellars, to board up tottering buildings and to aid injured. Dozens of fires started from short circuits.

Police had a bad scare when the ferry boat Knickerbocker was thrust under a bumper rail at Battery slip, giving a violent shaking to 225 passengers. Screams of men and women pealed over the crowded pier at 6 P.M. and telephone calls to Police Headquarters indicated a catastrophe.

Thousands of trees were uprooted all over the city. City Hall Park and Foley Square were littered with branches and Autumn leaves. Riverside Drive was blocked when eight trees, some of them thirty feet tall, were ripped out and plunged across the highway between 140th and 143d Sts. In Brooklyn alone, police estimated that 300 trees had been dislodged and 1,000 electric wires had been blown down.

Crop damage was a serious factor. Long Island potatoes were believed ruined, and prices immediately jumped to 75 cents per 100 pounds. The Jersey apple crop was another victim.

The Jersey coastline was battered by a series of tidal waves that left dozens of communities isolated. Brigantine was completely cut off when 400 feet of bridge - its lifeline to Atlantic City - sank out of sight. More that 1,000 persons in vacation cottages and year-round residences were marooned, without hope of connection with the outside world for weeks except by boat.

From Point Pleasant to Seaside Heights, boardwalks were ripped up and carried landward into towns. Plate glass windows were shattered and thousands of dollars in merchandise were ruined.

On Long Island, where the damage was put at upwards of $2,000,000, virtually every community was in darkness at one time or another during last night. In some points of Suffolk County, notably at Greenport, the storm was so severe that 950 boys and girls were kept in school until a brief abatement of the rain at 7 P.M. Fire trucks finally took them home.

Many persons were believed lost in small boats in Great South Bay. Two boys - William Weller, 14, and Edward Kohls, 18 - who set out from Mastic Beach at noon were unaccounted for at midnight.

Martial Law Declared.

Several towns in Massachusetts were under martial law. Providence, R. I., hit by a tidal wave, was in total darkness with its business district inundated, At the Boston Navy Yard, the U.S.S. constitution, historic "Old Ironsides," was in danger of capsizing.

Five ocean-going liners made port safely, but the Pan America, one of the American Republics Line, arrived in Brooklyn from Buenos Aires and other South American cities with ten seamen injured. The Queens Mary, pride of the Atlantic stayed fast at its dock in W. 50th St.

Off Nantucket, the hurricane - the worst since the 1936 storm of mid-September - is expected to spend itself sometime today. But New England was already hit harder in some sports than two years ago.

Train Schedules Crippled.

At St. Albans, Queens, the overhead railroad roadbed was washed out. Between Great Neck and Port Washington, L.I., power was shut off and commuters were transported by bus through streets running with water up to the mudguards.

On the New Haven, service was suspended between Hartford and Putnam, Conn. The State of Maine Express was routed through Province, R.I. Montreal-bound passengers were switched to the New York Central, because of inundation of the New Haven tracks around Springfield, Mass.

The situation in central and western Massachusetts was so serious that Gov. Charles L. Hurley called a meeting of his Executive Council to consider a declaration of a state of emergency.

At West Thompson, Conn., thirty families were driven to the hills when a dam burst, and at Putnam, fifty families were made homeless by waters which washed out the New Haven Railroad bed. A cementbridge was carried off at Quinne-baug.

Even in metropolitan Hartford, families were forced to flee the lowlands, and police patrolled the area in rowboats unused since the floods of two years ago.

Mills in the textile centers and other industrial plants were forced to close down, as streams mounted higher than at any time in seventy-five years.